Boarded Up

The window in this room was once a deliberate design decision. Colonial Architect James Barnet, working alongside Inspector General of the Insane Frederic Norton Manning and botanist Charles Moore, chose a north-facing foreshore site on Iron Cove specifically for its winter sun and summer breezes. Light was not incidental to the Kirkbride Complex. It was part of the treatment. Female Ward 9 & 10 sits within that complex, a system of ten ward blocks linked by a continuous covered veranda and arranged around landscaped courtyards. Ground was broken on 11 February 1880 and the first ward opened 1 July 1884. By 16 June 1885, the completed buildings housed 110 female and 303 male patients at a total construction cost of £235,539. The facility had been designed around the principles of moral therapy, making Callan Park Australia's first purpose-built hospital on that model. Seventeen sandstone blocks arranged across 10 acres, 30 buildings in total, 170 single rooms and 41 dormitories. By 1930, the hospital held 1,500 patients against a designed capacity of around 600 to 766. The inquiries that followed, in 1923, 1948, 1955, and 1961, all turned on overcrowding. The Kirkbride Complex carried patients until 1994, when the last services transferred out. The Sydney College of the Arts moved into the buildings in 1996 under a 99-year lease. Its Rozelle campus closed at the end of 2019. The photograph was made in 2019, in the ward's final year of occupation. Heavy timber boards cover the window. A single gap between them admits a thin line of light that falls into an otherwise dim interior. The room is bare and sealed. Barnet designed these windows to bring light inside. The boards do the opposite. What remains is the gap, and just enough light to see by.